Process: Crosshair x Sonnenzimmer = Codeine poster

This begins back in the winter when I heard that one of my all-time favorite bands Codeine was getting back together for a handful of shows, after being drafted out of dormancy for a Mogwai-curated ATP appearance.

Codeine, you may or may not remember, existed from about 1990-94 and put out 2 albums, an EP, and a few singles of the slowest, bleakest, most pathetic, most intense and in an odd way heaviest music of all time, before breaking up at their peak. They were Sub Pop's first non-grunge act, and they left a lot of people scratching their heads...but others like me at 19 were floored. They spawned many imitators, and well after their demise the word slowcore was coined by the sort of people who come up with dumb words. Calling Codeine a slowcore band is a bit like calling Joy Division a goth band, and at any rate they have a lot more in common with contemporaries like Slint, Bastro, Bitch Magnet and for that matter Joy Division, than with Low or Idaho.

"Every single Crosshair poster I've ever seen is almost exactly the same. Do these guys even have a bit of creativity in them? I mean, come one - shitty old building pics photoshopped with text over them. Pretty pathetic to say the least."

"it just seems like so little effort is put into creating this? am i missing something?"

Obviously, if there was a Chicago show and anyone other than Crosshair did the poster, I would have to destroy them. So I called someone who knew someone, and in the first straight up fanboy cold-call approach I've made in over a decade, lined it up directly with the band. When it came out that Codeine was also playing Primavera Sound in Barcelona (site of Flatstock Europe 7), that became two posters.

Later, I ran into Nick & Nadine at the opening of a local show of Ryan Duggan's posters. We talked shop as nerds will do when there's free beer. Nick made me jealous by telling me Sonnenzimmer were doing a Kraftwerk poster, and I hit back with "Yeah, well I'm doing TWO Codeine posters motherfucker!"

That got me thinking, because I had been planning for the second of the two (Chicago) to be unconventional and risky somehow. I'm in awe of Nick and Nadine's work, and even more so of the process that produces it. So I made the indecent proposal that Crosshair and Sonnenzimmer collaborate on this poster for a band we all loved. And what do you know, they were willing.

When Matt Rucins told us that Crosshair was doing the poster, we were happily jealous - as we knew they found the perfect fit. Then Dan wanted to share.... and well, once he opened that door, there was no going back for him... there was no way, he would pull this away from a collab....

After recomposing, I did a nine-color separation for screenprint. This took about two and a half working days, during which I listened to a hell of a lot of Codeine. In particular, the first 2 songs on the Barely Real EP are very much in this image. "Realize" for its humid density of sound, and "Jr." for the imagery and sense of location.